Self-confidence of archers before events: Mubarok 2022

Twenty archers from the Bantul district in the Yogyakarta region, 15 men and 5 women, completed a 35-item self-confidence questionnaire on 28 June 2022, ahead of the PORDA XVI provincial games. The authors do not compute means per athlete: they add up every answer from the whole group. The 14 items on external factors total 938 points and the remaining 21, on internal factors, 1444; on the authors' own cut-offs both parts fall in the "sufficient" band. The total of 2382, on the other hand, falls in the "good" band, whose lower limit is 2380. The paper reports nothing else: no competition scores, no comparisons and no link with performance.

It is a descriptive survey with a single questionnaire, completed in the indoor hall of the Universitas Mercu Buana campus in Yogyakarta. The paper, in Indonesian, does not report the questionnaire items, where they came from or any reliability measure; from the theoretical minimum and maximum given (700 and 3500 for 20 athletes and 35 items) a 1 to 5 response scale can be inferred. The rating bands are built by the authors from the ideal mean and standard deviation of the scale, not from external reference values. The athletes' level, age, discipline and years of experience are not given.

The rating rests entirely on arbitrary cut-offs, and the total clears the threshold of the upper band by just 2 points out of 2382: that is why two "sufficient" parts add up to a "good" whole. Expressed per athlete and per item, the mean score is 3.40 out of 5 (3.44 for internal factors, 3.35 for external ones), close to the middle of the scale. There are also errors of calculation and notation: for external factors the ideal mean is given as 1680, more than the maximum possible of 1400, and the band intervals are written with the inequality reversed. Without the questionnaire items nobody knows what was asked, and without any competition data it is impossible to say whether that level of confidence made any difference to results.

There is nothing here for archers to take away: the study captures the self-confidence reported by twenty archers on one day in June, using a questionnaire we cannot see, and connects it to no result at all. In the registry it serves only to record that the question has been asked of Indonesian archers at provincial level, and that the answer available does not allow anyone to say whether, or how much, self-confidence bears on scores.